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The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

jayacunzo.com

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Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#91

Post by Toutouxc »

shermantanktop wrote: post #14
jimbokun wrote: post #8

I agree. This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy. They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names. There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful wi…

ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

Claude does that too. “That always confuses me” or “I usually realize”.

Not only do these imply that the thing has a personality and preference, but also continuity and a life outside the chat window.

I had to add an explicit instruction not to impersonate a human, it was just too weird for me.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#92

Post by Springtime »

falcor84 wrote: post #63
Springtime wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This angle is touched on in the article, as the words on a page script vs Robin's performance of it which is drawing from his unique human experience which would have been different from another actor (the lived experience throughline the article is making, not necessarily the experiences being described in the script, mind). I do think though that article is a bit nebulous in parts, in the sense that articles and bo…

Are you referring to this part? > Where did his performance come from? How did those moments take shape? Only the actor could tell you, and actually, he probably couldn't. It was sensed more than it was consciously considered, but the alchemy required his lived experiences That just seemed to me like a cop-out - what exactly is it about his lived experiences that made him well suited to effectively convey the experie…

Was about this part:

> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.

The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.

They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#94

Post by klodolph »

kstenerud wrote: post #87
falcor84 wrote: post #46

It's a well-written monologue, with a fabulous delivery, but I think it fails spectacularly for this argument. From what I just looked into, neither of the main people involved, including Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, Reiner or Goldman, had personally experienced those scenarios of fighting on the front lines and having a friend die in their arms, or of losing their spouse to cancer. But nevertheless, they had…

When Robin gave that performance, he was 47 years old. He'd been married twice. He'd been addicted to cocaine, and had partied with John Belushi the night he died from an overdose - which drove him to clean up his act. Was some of his performance made up? Absolutely. Was he overreaching? Definitely. You can't know what a war zone is like until you've been in one. Words can't describe the strange normalcy that only ge…

There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).

Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.

What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#95

Post by sandspar »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #48
zelon88 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM that you talk to is an agent running on a server cluster. One of many that run many agents at once. Occasionally the dataset of each cluster gets combined and the results get pruned by other agents into the collective dataset. Even more agents are working with this dataset to create the next generation of AI. We are at the point now where AI is developed by AI, and humans cannot verify the code or the dataset…

I see.

zelon88 is being earnest and trying to help you in good faith, and you are mocking him, in public and for an audience.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#97

Post by librasteve »

Counterpoint:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

— Roy Batty

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#98

Post by mirsadm »

dualvariable wrote: post #76
shermantanktop wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

I had claude throw something like "the last time I did ..." at me. They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.

You're right to push back...

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#100

Post by ithkuil »

shermantanktop wrote: post #14
jimbokun wrote: post #8

I agree. This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy. They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names. There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful wi…

ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.

I wonder why, out of the many things models definitely can't do, you choose "try" and "find out". Surely every time it proposes a solution and then gets possibly corrected by the human minder its "trying something out" and surely it can use tools like web search and code execution to "find out" stuff?
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